Abstract

In addressing the question of how the temporal Arts are ‘preserved’, this paper aims to throw light on the mind of the listener as interpreter-conspirator, by proposing that Peter Mark Roget (1779- 1869)’s ‘Classification of Ideas’ from the introduction to his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), can be viewed as the subjective presentation of the structure of a shared system of signification by which artists, spectators and auditors alike, make sense of their art.